CASE STUDY
Located in south-eastern England , Suffolk County Council ( SCC ) operates across six sites , providing services including planning , waste management , schools , social care , business support and libraries . Staff are supported by an IT team of 30 , delivering network , server and cloud infrastructure , data centre management , system availability monitoring , backup , recovery and storage of data .
Challenges
Head of Design and Platforms , Simon Mason , and Mark Fox , Senior Technical Lead , were aware of some gaps in capabilities , including a lack of ability to perform complete SCC backups within the available time frame , with the result that not all data was protected . This created stress across the team , who feared it might be unable to fulfil a request to restore key files .
The leaders ’ primary concern was to rectify the situation with a focus on both recovery of individual files and the restore of systems more broadly . In addition , they were engaged in a whole-system re-evaluation which involved examining primary data storage , with a longer-term goal of moving on-premises storage to the cloud .
A gap analysis set alongside strategic and forwardlooking ambitions led to the following priorities : achieve a smaller footprint in primary and Disaster Recovery data centres ; move to a more modern data protection platform ; reduce operational costs around support and backup / restore ; and improve the ability to recover both individual files and complete file systems .
Solution
Cohesity was initially engaged to install a data management solution capable of completing full backups with Cohesity DataProtect . The solution was deployed at two sites , each of which was provisioned with a Cohesity cluster . In each case , these were used for backup and recovery and also for running Microsoft SQL , Oracle , Dell Compellent NAS and VMware workloads . With this solution in place , a complete NAS backup was always possible . Thus , Mason and Fox had confidence they could restore any file requested .
The Cohesity solution replaced the legacy , manual mechanisms used for protecting Oracle data with industry standards . This eased the backup process
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